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Traditional Tories and working-class converts agree on culture but little else

Feb 20th 2021

LONG BEFORE he or any of his readers had ever heard the term, Boris Johnson cast himself as the antithesis of all that is woke. His columns in the Daily Telegraph, the house journal of the Tory Party, took aim at assaults on common sense, real or imagined. If political correctness is not resisted, it will go on and on, becoming more and more irrational, he wrote. Even then, he had an eye on the culture war raging across the Atlantic. He praised the counter-revolutionaries opposing a ban on British fox-hunting, noting that their protest march was organised by an American who understands the weapons that must be used in the Kulturkampf.

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Mr Johnson has hardly changed his tune since becoming prime minister. He made clear his displeasure at the absurd form-filling initially required of volunteers helping with the rollout of the covid-19 vaccine and insisted last year that Rule, Britannia! be played at the Proms, an annual festival of music and pomp. This week, two more such sallies were enthusiastically trailed by his former employer as a major government escalation of the war on woke.

The first is an attempt by Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, to protect guest speakers at universities whose views cause offence. Mr Williamson plans to expand the scope of a legal duty to promote freedom of speech on campus to cover not just university authorities but also student unions, in the hope of preventing controversial talks being cancelled.

Such instances are rarea study at Kings College London found freedom of expression had been infringed at only six of about 15,000 events over five yearsbut attract considerable publicity. And there is more evidence that students and academics censor their own views for fear of adverse reaction from peers. Polling for Policy Exchange, a right-leaning think-tank, found only four in ten Leave-supporting students would be comfortable expressing their views about Brexit in class.

The second concerns the past. Oliver Dowden, the culture secretary, has reportedly called a meeting to urge museum and charity bigwigs to defend Britains culture and history. The National Trust, a charity that tends historic houses and gardens, caused a fuss by highlighting the colonial ties of its properties and their original owners; other bodies are mulling the removal of statues of figures such as slave-traders who are now considered villains of the empire. Mr Dowden wants the statues to stay, arguing that confident countries do not airbrush the history upon which they are founded.

Such worries may seem rather small during a pandemic that has closed the museums Mr Dowden is fretting about and cancelled even the least controversial university events. Nor do most voters care about cultural issues as much as vocal lobbies on either side. In a poll for The Economist last year, more than twice as many Britons thought the empire a source of pride than one of shame. But just under half of those polled reckoned it was neither or had no opinion.

That will not prevent more skirmishes in the culture wars. Senior Tories argue that such fights help them unite two distinct types of Conservative voter: Telegraph-reading traditionalists in southern England and working-class voters in red wall seats in northern England and Wales who switched from Labour to the Tories in 2019. That is probably true. Paula Surridge of Bristol University has shown that Labour did particularly poorly among left-leaning voters with authoritarian views, a good proxy for cultural issues. Support for Labour among such voters dropped by 17% between 2017 and 2019, the biggest decline among any group of voters. Not all cultural issues resonate equally. Voters who did not go to university themselves are unlikely to be concerned about campus politics, says one of the new breed of Tory MP, who represents an ex-mining constituency. But they are receptive to appeals to defend British history. Theres a huge sense of pride, he says.

There are two problems with the strategy. Sir Keir Starmer, who replaced Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader last spring, does not share his predecessors lack of enthusiasm for the national anthem and the queen. A greater danger for the Tories is that culture is just about the only topic on which their old and new voters agree. As the pandemic recedes, the government will have to make choices about the future role of the state and how to steady the nations finances, which cannot please both camps. How much easier, then, to put off such thorny decisions and play a little more Elgar.

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "Bonfire of the insanities"

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Bonfire of the insanities - Tories bet on culture wars to unite disparate voters | Britain - The Economist

Protesters burn an effigy of French President Emmanuel Macron during an anti-France demonstration in Pakistan last November. Photo: DIBYANGSHU SARKAR/AFP via Getty Images

PARIS, France On the 17th of October, the day after French school teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded outside his school, threats from Frances far-right began to rain down on liberal academics across the country.

ric Fassin a professor of sociology at the University of Paris 8 who had written a blog arguing the reaction to terror attacks must at all costs avoid falling into their trap of becoming a conflict of civilisations became a lightning rod for their anger.

Traitor wrote one far-right supporter on Twitter; collaborator added another. But one individual known in the neo-Nazi scene struck a more chilling tone with an overt death threat: Ive put you on my list of assholes to decapitate when it begins.

Fassin is among a group of French academics that supposedly embody the concept of Islamo-gauchisme (Islamo-leftism), a term suggesting an alliance between extremist Islamists and left-wing academics that had until recently only been used in neo-Nazi circles. The insult is levelled at those whose so-called woke theories point out the discrimination suffered by Muslims in France, where deep-set discrimination touches hiring, housing, policing and beyond paralleling culture wars currently raging in the US and the UK.

The term has found its way into the lexicon of prominent members of the French government. Islamo-gauchisme is an ideology which, from time to time, leads to the worst, Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer told French radio station Europe 1. Then Grarld Darmanin, Frances right-leaning Minister of the Interior, used the term in the National Assembly, referring to intellectual accomplices in terrorist acts.

On Sunday, events took a dramatic turn. Frdrique Vidal, the University Minister, went on TV channel CNews and denounced how Islamo-gauchisme plagues society as a whole and pledged to launch an investigation into academic research considered in breach, particularly postcolonial studies.

They are in the minority and some do it to carry radical ideas or militant ideas always looking at everything through the prism of their desire to divide, to fracture, she said, likening it to an alliance between Mao Zedong and Ayatollah Khomeini.

The comments have sparked outrage. On Tuesday, Frances Conference of University Presidents called for the debate to be elevated and that the government should not talk nonsense. On Wednesday, the French National Centre for Scientific Research, who Vidal said should carry out the investigation, criticised the political exploitation that is... emblematic of a regrettable instrumentalisation of science. On Thursday, daily newspaper Libration dedicated its front page to the debacle, quipping that Vidal had lost her faculties.

However, for Fassin, and numerous other academics across France, the efforts to target them are cause for serious concern and could pose a very real danger. This is very worrying, he told VICE World News. This is a political attempt to control knowledge. One imagines that it will not succeed, but the effect sought is intimidation. Above all, it helps to justify repression.

Frdric Sawicki, professor of political science at Paris 1 University Panthon-Sorbonne, said he felt targeted by the move. If you declare yourself hostile to the ban on the wearing of the veil or to the organisation of a mandatory minute of silence in schools after a terrorist attack, he said. You are therefore an accomplice and as a consequence, you become an Islamo-left-winger!

I am outraged, he added. The French Republic, except during the period of the Vichy regime, has always protected academic freedom. The Minister should protect this freedom at the foundation of any democracy.

Eyebrows have also been raised at the timing of the move by Vidal, with protests in response to the widespread problem of sexual assault on campus and huge numbers of students forced into financial uncertainty during the pandemic leading to snaking queues for the subsidised university canteens.

The minister's words are just a political diversion to make us forget her catastrophic management of higher education and research, said Lon Thbault, a student at SciencesPo University Paris. If Frdrique Vidal put as much energy into fighting these problems as she does into the media show, we wouldn't have any more students living in precarity. She is out of touch with universities and students.

Michel Deneken, president of the University of Strasbourg, said the underlying motives behind Vidals announcement are purely political. The regional and presidential elections are on the horizon, he said. The government is using this as a way to capture the support of the right. [Right-wing daily newspaper] Le Figaro writes every day about Islamo-gauchisme every day now.

French Muslim campaign groups express little doubt that it is an attempt to flirt with the far-right. One has the impression that every week they want to find a new reason to talk about Islam, said Sefen Guez Guez, a lawyer for the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF).

But the French governments crackdown on campuses also extends to legislation to limit research that is deemed unacceptable. The Senate last month adopted a bill setting the research budget for French universities, and while it is yet to pass through the National Assembly, critics say will curtail student protests and put freedom of research at stake by requiring it to align with the values of the republic.

Rim-Sarah Alouane, a French legal academic and PhD candidate in comparative law at the University Toulouse Capitole, said the vast majority of people working in academia are shocked and terrified for the future of research in this country. She added that French academia has been falling apart due to budget cuts and lack of recruitment.

For Alouane, its the latest in a long line of tightening of civil freedoms, including the controversial separatism law aimed at tackling the Islamist terrorism that has grown since 2015 but labelled Islamophobic by rights groups that was passed by the National Assembly, and the Global Security law, which at the end of last year proposed banning the filming of police, despite several high-profile cases of police violence.

You need to integrate this kind of announcement into a broader scope which is the hyper securitisation of our society, that is processed by limiting civil liberties on the ground of national security and public order, she said.

It comes as part of a wider reckoning in France, with woke leftist theories on race, gender and post-colonialism said to be imported from the US and the UK the target of the governments ire. Theres a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities, Blanquer said in October.

Philippe Marlire, professor of French and European Politics at University College London, says that those Anglophone countries are themselves facing battles over freedom of speech, wokeness and so-called cancel culture at universities.

I think that theres a bit of a deja-vu with whats happening in the UK, he said. But the French situation is far worse. In the UK, the attacks remain quite implicit, but in France the government is trying to taint the personalities and reputations of academics. These are highly dangerous means that is the usual approach of the far right.

Marlire, who has himself been the target of far-right attacks including in a recent article claiming he has not ceased to work to promote racialist ideology warns there could be serious repercussions for this approach.

France is in complete denial when it comes to race, he said. Islamo-gauchisme is of course an insult. Its almost a physical aggression because you put people at risk. What is remarkable is that its becoming more mainstream.

The Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation did not respond to a request for comment. But government spokesman Gabriel Attal said on Wednesday that French President Emmanuel Macron has an absolute attachment to the independence of teacher-researchers.

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If You Thought the Culture War in the US and UK Was Dumb, Check Out Frances - VICE

Anglo-Saxon shareholders appear to have the backing of the yogurt-makers French patriarch

Feb 20th 2021

EMMANUEL FABER used to be seen as the spiritual son of Franck Riboud, honorary chairman and former boss of Danone, whose father Antoine co-founded the French yogurt-maker. Mr Riboud handpicked Mr Faber as his successor and loyally backed his transformation of Danone into Frances first entreprise mission, a corporate form with a defined social purpose.

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In recent months the relationship has soured. According to the French press, Mr Riboud thinks Mr Faber is more interested in saving the planet than saving his firm. Danones share price fell by 27% in 2020 while those of rivals such as Nestl and Unilever made gains amid pandemic larder-stocking. Its full-year results, due on February 19th, are unlikely to inspire investors confidence.

Danone has been hit harder by covid-19 than rivals because of its large bottled-water business. Its Evian, Badoit and Volvic brands make money mainly from sales in restaurants, bars and airports. But that is not the only problem. In 2017 Danone overpaid for WhiteWave, an American maker of health-focused fare that it bought for $12.5bn. The deal, which strained the balance-sheet but did not produce hoped-for returns, is the main reason for Danones current malaise, says Alan Erskine of Credit Suisse, a bank. Bruno Monteyne of Bernstein, a broker, points to years of underinvestment in brands, which face stiff competition from supermarkets private labels, at a time when Danones dairy and baby-food businesses slow as birth rates fall and people drink less milk.

Faced with these challenges, in October Mr Faber announced an overhaul of the business along more geographic lines. Perhaps 2,000 jobs will be cut. It was the fifth reorganisation on his seven-year watch.

Enough already, huffs Artisan Partners, an American investment fund which says it is Danones third-biggest shareholder with a 3% stake. In a meeting with board members on February 16th it demanded Mr Fabers exit, a stop to his latest restructuring, and the sale of struggling brands such as Mizone, a Chinese vitamin drink, and the Vega range of plant-based foods.

Artisan is the latest Anglo-Saxon meddler to pile on the pressure. In November Bluebell Capital Partners, a London-based hedge fund that owns a stake in Danone, demanded that the firm boot out Mr Faber and split the role of chairman and CEO. Causeway Capital Management, an American fund, has echoed Bluebells call.

Mr Fabers entourage refers to the demands, which appear to have the blessing of 65-year-old Mr Riboud, as a revolution of gunslinger grandpas. The activists may still succeed, and not just because they are not in fact that wizened. Helpfully, the French state is staying out of the fray; its spokesman said it had no comment. The government has no stake in Danone, but in 2005 declared it an industrial jewel to be defended against foreign buyers. Maybe not when they have an ally on the inside.

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline "Culture wars"

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Culture wars - Can Anglo-Saxon activist investors whip Danone into shape? | Business - The Economist

Rush Hudson Limbaugh IIIBorn: January 12th, 1951Died: February 17th, 2021

Rush Limbaugh, who has died aged 70 after suffering from cancer, virtually created the style of political shock jock radio that made him so influential. His broadcasts, featuring attacks on opponents as purveyors of what we now call fake news, became the template for televisions Fox News, and at its peak played a huge part in Newt Gingrichs Republican Revolution of 1994, which recaptured the House of Representatives from Bill Clintons Democrats.

Limbaugh set the tone for the internet age of politics, calling womens rights activists feminazis, referring to HIV/Aids as Rock Hudsons disease and claiming environmentalist wackos were a bunch of scientists organised around a political position.

He argued that the existence of gorillas disproved evolution, characterised both the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (2010) and the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand (2019) as false flag operations organised by leftists, and accused the Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe of allowing the Charlottesville rioting in 2017 to worsen in order to boost his presidential ambitions. Have you ever noticed how composite sketches of criminals always look like [the black activist] Jesse Jackson? he asked his listeners.

When he cut off callers on air, he would play a vacuum cleaner noise, shouting caller abortion. His listeners, whom he dubbed ditto-heads ate it up, while those who were offended often tuned in to express their disgust. In recent years the independent fact-checking site PolitiFact consistently rated Limbaugh high in terms of pants on fire untruths, and just as consistently at zero on truths.

Limbaugh (pronounced LIM baw) was born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, into a family of conservative judges that included his father, whose name was also Rush. His mother, Mildred (nee Armstrong), was the family clown, and encouraged Rusty in his love of radio. He did poorly at school, then quit Southeast Missouri State University after a year and found a job with a radio station in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, as Bachelor Jeff Christie, but was fired after he told a black caller he claimed to find difficult to understand to take the bone out of your nose and call again.

After being fired from several other stations for he fetched up in 1983 at KRBK in Sacramento, California where he began to attach attention. In 1987, during the Ronald Reagan era, the Federal Communications Commission repealed the Fairness Doctrine, which had required users of the public airwaves to allow equal time if they broadcast political opinion. This opened the floodgates to the likes of Limbaugh, and in 1988 he moved to WABC in New York, which became the flagship for a 56-station network broadcast of his show, scheduled, unusually for talk, at midday. By 1990 he had five million listeners.

Another godsend for his show was the election of Clinton in 1992, the year in which Limbaugh began a syndicated TV programme produced by the future Fox News boss Roger Ailes.

Limbaughs deeply personal anti-Clinton campaigning was so effective that when Gingrich and the Republicans re-took the House, they made him an honorary member of the Republican caucus. He and Sixta had divorced in 1990, and in 1994 he married Marta Fitzgerald , an aerobics instructor. He told an interviewer he struggled with love because: I am too much in love with myself.

The TV show ended in 1996, but on radio Limbaugh went from strength to strength. He now lived in Palm Beach, Florida, where he produced his radio show from his southern command centre.

He was divorced from Marta in 2004, and for the next two years was linked romantically to the CNN anchor Daryn Kagan. In 2006 Limbaugh was arrested on his return from a trip to the Dominican Republic, where he had bought viagra with a false prescription. Although charges were dropped, WBAL in Baltimore became the first station to ditch his show.

The George W Bush years seemed to stretch him; he said the US torture of prisoners in 2003 at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was no worse than what happens at a Skull and Bones initiation, perhaps forgetting that Bush and his father were both members of that Yale University secret society.

But just as Clinton had been a godsend, so Barack Obama seemed to inspire Limbaugh to new heights of partisan venom. Apart from claiming that Obama was foreign-born, he accused the president of allowing ebola into the US in revenge for African slavery. When Republicans rallied in the 2010 midterm elections, Limbaugh again reaped much of the credit.

In 2008 he had signed an eight-year $400m contract with the Cumulus broadcasting company, and in 2013 he moved his home station to New Yorks WOR. After signing a four-year extension in 2018, his income that year totalled $84.5m, second only to one of the original, non-political, fellow shock jocks, Howard Stern. In 2010 he married for the fourth time, to Kathryn Rogers, a party planner. Elton John sang at their wedding reception for a reported $1m fee.

In January 2020 he was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer; he announced it on air the following month, the day before he received the presidential medal of freedom from Trump. Nevertheless he failed to throw his full backing to Trumps attempts to overturn the election result; he accused the presidents lawyers of failing to support their claims of voter fraud with evidence.

He is survived by Kathryn. Guardian

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Rush Limbaugh obituary: Shock jock radio host who set the tone for US culture wars - The Irish Times

Another year, another round of debates that foreground entirely the wrong aspect of some words from Martin Scorsese. In his new essay for Harpers, the director bemoans what he sees as the art of cinema being reduced to its basest commercial elements, at the expense of more serious filmmaking. He rails against the idea of content as a term leveling all culturefilm, pop music, TikToksinto a pernicious and false equivalency that removes the art from art in favor of the universal ideology of capitalism and consumerism. More personally, he champions curation over algorithms: the combination of passion and expertise that leads to sharing what you love. An act of generosity, as he puts it. This is in contrast to algorithms, code that impersonally treats the audience as consumer and the content (as opposed to content) of a film as an assemblage of discernible unitsmeaning, if you liked one movie about a tempestuous romantic relationship (Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind) you may enjoy some other ones, too. Have you seen The Ugly Truth? An algorithm a few years back thought I might want to after seeing the former.

Anyone who can recall the halcyon days of 14 months ago remembers the last time some mild complaints from Scorsese ignited a barrage of online debatesi.e., noting that he didnt really consider Marvel movies to be cinema. Which, in turn, was just another salvo in his ongoing critique of business-minded Hollywood decision-making, something hes been doing since his fellow movie brats Steven Spielberg and George Lucas started breaking the bank in the 1970s. Those quick to label Scorsese as out of touch with the changing world of entertainment seemed to miss this larger argument.

Worse, the ensuing cultural debates largely obscure the issue that lay at the root of Scorseses comments. Instead, its eclipsed by partisans focusing on the actual quality of Marvel films (in the case of 2019), and by accusations of cultural gatekeeping in the current brouhahathe predictable charge of Oh, yeah? Who decides whats quality and what isnt? You, Mr. Bigshot Movie Director? The latter charge misreads his act of generosity as some outmoded form of scolding, the idea that cultural gatekeepers are busily shooing us away from our beloved popcorn entertainment. And the former is presumably of little interest to the longtime director, and was never really Scorseses larger concern (he himself admits hes barely seen any of the MCU films). The MCU was merely a stand-in for a sort of predictable mass-market entertainment of the kind he sees in opposition to a more artistically provocative cinema, one we might term a more elitist standard of art. In his latest writing, we can substitute the nefarious content for the MCUa fair association, Id wager, in Scorseses eyes.

But as we forge ahead into a young decade, it may be time to acknowledge that the leveling of all popular culture into some middlebrow standardin which everything is judged as meritorious on the same critical groundshas glossed over a profound fissure that never really went away: the one between highbrow and lowbrow pop culture, or art vs. entertainment. This isnt a call to return to some faux-objective singular standard of evaluation; thats not even possible, let alone desirable. Rather, after years of debate over the new model of critical assessment, in which all popular culture is seen as equally valuable, it may be time to reconsider how to set new parameters for elitisma recipe for a culture that never really shook off the distinctions it tried so hard to bury, only to resurface once Martin Scorsese had to promote The Irishman.

Postmodernism has ridden the culture into its current state, in which the former elite control of art has ceded to the collective populist notion of art being essentially equivalent to media: Because anythingfilm, TV shows, podcasts, mixtapes, pop-up storescan be art, its easier to just let go of the reins and allow that everything is art. As Jay David Bolter wrote in his 2019 book The Digital Plenitude: The Decline Of Elite Culture And The Rise Of New Media, The loss of the center means that there is no single standard of quality that transcends the various communities of practice. However much some may still long for quality, the word does not have a global meaning There can be no general cultural judgment about American television, because there are no generally shared standards. Two main currents have risen to dominance in media during the 21st century as a result: 1) the demolishing of previous standards of elitism (often racist, sexist, and classist) via a mentality often loosely called poptimism; and 2) a broader cultural bias against elitism in any guise, fostered in part by a decades-long culture war waged by the right. The two ideas are entwined, but theyre far from the same. The first is, more or less, a very good thing; the second, not so much. And it needs to be challenged. Scorseses not alone.

The Scorsese fracas did one good thing: It highlighted the fault line that still exists, despite decades of postmodernism muddying it into insensibility. The disjunction between highbrow and lowbrow, or between authentic versus manufactured, or art versus entertainment, is as present as ever, just below the surface. (None of these dichotomies need necessarily be opposed terms.) Replace entertainment with content and Scorsese is right there with us. It used to be a given that highbrow and lowbrow culture were separate playing fields on which we could participate in film, television, literature, and more. It was always a continuum, trueas poet and professor Judith Hougen has stressed, the categories here are not neat and tidy some entertainment is truthful and thought-provoking, and some art is disordered and despairingbut the divisions held.

Indeed, what was developed around the mid-20th centurycall it middlebrow culturewas originally a way not to flatten distinctions between elevated, elitist art and lowest-common-denominator pandering, but as a means of getting people to blend some artistically inclined entertainment in with their mass-marketed pulp. It suggested that taking in an orchestral performance would help keep you intellectually and artistically challenged, rather than basking in the lazy enjoyment of just watching Big Bang Theory reruns for the 20th night in a row. If that sounds boring, or if you have to be talked into it, its what writer Dan Kois calls eating our cultural vegetables. (If his analogy doesnt already make it clear, hes not a fan.)

For every Madonna-like creative type (or Godfather-esque demolishing of the highbrow/lowbrow distinction) straddling the line between populist pandering and bold artistic exploration, there are far more examples of cookie-cutter entertainment to hold up against countercultural art. A hundred Family Matters for every 7 Up, a dozen Herbie Rides Again for every A Woman Under The Influence. Even the 90s permitted a clear demarcation between the two, in which the quality of corporate-profit-driven, mass-market culture was generally agreed to be artistically inferior to that which sprang up from independent culture; almost no one tried to argue New Kids On The Block were of a piece with Sonic Youth.

But the 21st century has seen a dramatic leveling out of all popular culture. Especially in the past decade, the shift has been from a snarky, scornful dismissal of mainstream, glossy, prefabricated popular culture by critical gatekeepers to a celebratory acceptance of any and all types of artists and entertainment as equally worthy of our time and attention. (Including, with good reason, on this very site.) Katy Perry is now as artistically valid as Bjrk, and woe be to those who suggest otherwise. This was most clearly driven home in a protest against the concept of the guilty pleasure, with critics at publications that would have previously turned up their noses at trashy reality TV and vacuous pop genericism actually leading the charge against thinking anyone should ever have to feel guilty for enjoying any pop culture, ever, because anything that brings pleasureby this readingis a net good.

Not everyone celebrated this collapse. The art critic Barbara Rose bemoaning the demise of the high/low disjunction in the art world can now be read as a eulogy for all former divisions of American culture:

We didnt like junk. There wasnt this horrible leveling, where everything is as important as everything else. There was a sense of the hierarchy of values. We felt that we had to make a distinction between Mickey Mouse and Henry James. Theres a generation now that feels you dont have to make that distinction I dont believe in democracy in art. I think that when elitism got a bad name in this country, it was the beginning of the end for American culture.

Of course, left unsaid in this homily to the value of the highbrow/lowbrow split, and the deconstruction of the elite canon of great works, is the role that classism, sexism, and racism played in maintaining such hierarchies. The supposedly objective standard of greatness in art reinforced the biases and prejudices of those who decided what was great, which for a very long time was old white men. And their canon didnt just marginalize women and artists of color or other cultures; it was actively used as a propagandistic cudgel to browbeat other cultures into submission, part of the Civilising Mission of colonial bureaucrats during the era of Manifest Destiny, as academic Camilla Nelson notes. Thats a tough foundation to upend.

So despite the Culture Wars of the 80s and 90s, which saw the idea of multiculturalism emerge largely victorious against narrow-minded forces of Eurocentric panglossianism, its been a steady uphill battle to continue diversifying and broadening the scope of voices allowed into popular culture. Even in 2018, an essay in The Washington Post still needed to explain to some readers why expanding our literary canon to include more women and authors of color benefits us all:

We must read Shakespeare and authors who are women, Arab, Muslim, queer. Most of the world is neither white nor European, and the United States may be a majority-minority country by mid-century. White people will gain more by embracing this reality rather than fighting it. As for literature, the mindset that turns the canon into a bunker in order to defend one dialect of English is the same mindset that closes borders, enacts tariffs and declares trade wars to protect its precious commodities and its besieged whiteness. But literature, like the economy, withers when it closes itself off from the world. The world is coming anyway. It demands that we know ourselves and the Other.

So its understandable why the old distinctions needed to be demolished: In many ways, they sucked. Its all too easy to say Atlanta is good, but its no Mad Men and elide the long history of institutionalized racism that has traditionally devalued the work of BIPOC artists, especially because so much of these ideas were taught to us at the unconscious level. To paraphrase educator and activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham, patriarchy and racism are the smog we all breathe, whether were aware of it or not.

Poptimism (a term that may or may not be derisive, depending on whos using it) began in music, but is a mentality that has expanded to embrace TV, film, and more. Even literature, once the last refuge of the snobbish elite, has embraced the shift. And it came about for the best of reasons: to overthrow ossified, outdated, and often racist and sexist ideologies that had long dictated what was worthy of consideration and what could be dismissed as lesser entertainments. As music critic Maura Johnston put it, poptimism is not about blindly accepting every piece of radio-ready music that comes down the pike and hailing it as the next important thing. Instead, its about throwing out the artificial distinctions that elevate Serious Mass-Appeal Music (usually made by men, and with guitars) over Frothy Bubbly Stuff (which often appeals to women as much as, if not more than, it does men).

One of the most salutary effects of the poptimism attitude is that it helped to raise up artists and entertainment that may have formerly been sidelined. Genres like K-pop have entered the cultural discussion in a far more inclusive way. Whereas hip-hop was once belittled as music lacking the depth of rock, Kendrick Lamar can now win the Pulitzer Prize. And where N.K. Jemisin once decried her books being placed in the African American Fiction section of bookstores, despite the clear SF&F label on their spines, she is now the first author ever to win three consecutive Best Novel Hugo awards for her Broken Earth trilogy. Poptimism may not have caused these advancements, but it helped shaped a new mentality of greater inclusiveness and diversity. Its wrapped up in the same laudable mission that launched sites like this one: the belief that all pop culture is worthy of serious debate.

Unfortunately, over time, those last couple words tended to trail off the mental page for a lot of the public: A slightly different idea took hold in the popular imaginationone that says simply, All pop culture is worthy. Any critic in recent years who has dared to suggest that beloved graven idols of our era may not always be that great is surely familiar with the flood of How dare you! attacks from online voices. Indeed, celebrities who find themselves confronted with a negative review are now as apt to sic their followers on the source of that criticism as they are to ignore it, knowing a stan culture will fight the battle for them.

Critics and criticism mostly continue to uphold the best values of poptimism, despite ongoing debates over its fading relevance, or the degree to which it has eroded critique: Scorsese-esque complaints often err painfully close to misguided kids today laments. The problem isnt internal to communities of critics; its less a critical belief than a wider cultural sense that any kind of elitism is inherently bad. Just as a sarcastic and cynical dismissal of mainstream entertainment in the 90s prevented those obsessed with authenticity from seeing the value of Friends or The Rock, now an everything-is-art attitude prevents a legion of Marvel fans from acknowledging that Martin Scorsese has a point.

And its past due time for wider discussions of pop culture to acknowledge the fissure below our feet, and stop pretending that the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow has been willed away, instead of just papered over. One shouldnt judge Parasite in the same way one judges Aquaman, because theyre not the same thing. Theyre not even trying to be the same thing. When I first started working as a critic, I liked to joke that I had two different scales by which to judge movies, Art and Pieces Of Shit. And something could be a great Piece Of Shitspeaking of The Rockeven as its a poor claimant to the status of Art. It was intended as a jokey caricature of how to evaluate cinema, but the point is actually sincere.

Scorseses comparison to theme park rides isnt bad; something like J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot, Drag Me To Hell, Jurassic World, or Pirates Of The Caribbean aspires to be an adrenaline-spiking thrill (the last two have theme parks in their creative DNA), a movie that takes you on a vertiginously exciting ride, with little concern for depth or nuance or challenge to the viewer. And thats an admirable goaltheres no reason for The Expendables 2 to try and match the enigmatic grace of Mulholland Dr. or the emotional gut punch of Manchester By The Sea. Not every Marvel movie needs to try for an Oscar. And whats more, theres a world of distinction between a mass-marketed, exhaustively field-tested Hollywood product concerned more with not offending than with challenging its audience, and a film that doesnt give a shit about such cares. Its a structural, foundational disparity and should be acknowledged as such. There isnt just a quality difference between the average Saturday-morning cartoon and Spirited Away; theres a qualitative difference between the two.

But with the new insights and advancements made in the 21st century, we face a highbrow/lowbrow cleavage that is hopefully very different from what it used to be. Rather than attempting to return to some gatekeeping of the canon, criticism can retain the best elements of poptimism in its arsenal: Making room for art and entertainment that has been marginalized in the past, and resisting the urge to snark and mock that which isnt attempting to do anything more than grant some fleeting, corporate-sponsored diversion to peoples lives. We can watch The Bachelor without pretending its quality television, rather than an indulgent pleasure akin to a visual pixie stick. (And we can critique it all the same, knowing that disposable pop culture has much to say about the world we live in and the entertainment we consume.) And we cansay it with me nowrevel in Marvel movies without pretending theyre attempting to do the same thing as Raging Bull. Pop culture is, and should be treated, different according to the kind of pop culture it is.

And to return to Scorseses latest, actual, point: Curation should be celebrated, just as expertise should be appreciated and encouraged. And theres a reasonable place for the algorithm. The rapacious capitalistic dictates of what kinds of movies get seen, streamed, and distributed shouldnt be swept under the rug, any more than the grim economic realities of our current era that led to that predicament. Sure, we can well assure Scorsese that we know the difference between varying kinds of content: A Fellini film and a YouTube video of a cat falling out a window to AWOLNATIONs Sail are very different things, thank you very much. But its disingenuous to pretend were his intended target: The corporations and bottom-line-minded decision makers who dictate the value of content dont give a shit about qualitative differences, and certainly dont care about the artistic merit of one over the other. Who controls our access to both art and entertainment is very much a matter of crucial importance, and the extremely rich people determining those matters do not need defending. They need the Martin Scorseses of the world to call them out; and rather than take umbrage at the suggestion that any movies we enjoy could be anything less than capital-A Art, maybe the rest of us need to support Scorsese, lest we eventually not even know what it is were missing out on.

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